Blessed and Given: Personal Stories

The stories for each week of Lent will be uploaded at the beginning of Lent.

Ideal viewing on a phone or tablet. These six testimonies are not directly related to the Gospel but rather to the theme of ‘Blessed + Broken’ and how they have experienced this in their own lives. These stories are relevant at any time of the year. The scripts (PDF) for each story will also be provided on this page.

Four of the stories in the ‘Blessed and Given’ section have been written and narrated by young people. The other two stories concern major events that occurred when the person was in early adulthood.

Week 1: Katelyn Ross speaks about suffering from anorexia and her battle to overcome the messages from the media, advertising and the fashion industry about ‘body image’.

Week 3: Michael Tanuvasa Kelemete has Samoan background and was very close to his grand-parents. He speaks of his profound grief after their death and his eventual decision to go to the seminary and train to be a priest.

NB The publisher aplogises for an error on page 7 of the ‘Blessed + Broken’ book. Michael Tanuvasa Kelemete is of Samoan background, not ‘Tongan background’.

Week 4: At age 23 Clare Sultmann had the world beneath her feet – the perfect job in a Sydney legal practice and an apartment at Bondi Beach – until a garbage truck drove over her and sent her into a sequence of 37 surgeries.

Week 6: Ora Duffley is a young teacher who conveys her anguish at the reports of violence and destruction inflicted upon the Christian communities of northern Iraq by Daesh (ISIS) in 2016. In 2017 she visited these communities to help the local people rebuild their towns and churches with the help of SOS Chretiens d’Orient.